Cards for the Men

Those of you who know me well, will know that I am very outnumbered in my family, so I am always needing cards for men. I find these quite hard to do especially when I have left it to the last minute to make them, so this week I decided to make a few in advance. 

I raided my digi stamp folder and chose three images- Kingfisher in the rushes, In the harbour, and A Scottish castle, all purchases from Stitchy Bear. (Their site has changed considerable since I bought these, and they no longer seem to have these images, so I have not included a link).

I printed the Kingfisher out twice and coloured them both the same with copic markers. I cut them with a Spellbinders deckle edge rectangle die. For the mats I chose two different blue snippets - both saved from brochures of a well-known high street bank! - and cut them with deckle edge scissors. The background is a photograph, sized to fit the front of the card, and faded out so that it compliments the image without over powering it. I finished these with a Signature Die sentiment cut to match the image mat.

I printed out, In the Harbour, and then I altered it so that it was the right size and in the right position to  fall across the centre of a card, and printed it again.

Because this second print was for an ´almost´ one layer card, to save on weight for international posting, I couldn´t use my copic pens to colour it as these leak through the card, so I used coloursoft pencils instead. The waves, anchor and sentiment were all cut using my silhouette cameo machine.

As the second image was to be layered up, I did colour this one with copics, and hand-cut it, and its blue mat, using the inner and outer edges of a Labels 8 die. (I often resort to this because the gap between one die, and the next size up, is just too wide). I set this at an angle on a cream textured card, and stamped the sentiment - from a Crafty Individuals word set - with brown archival ink. The seagull on a post is a Chocolate Baroque stamp that I stamped on a snippet of white card, coloured and then cut out.

The final image I only printed once because I felt I was more limited in what I could do with it. In the end I added some subtle colour with copics, using warm greys for the rocks and bridge, and cool greys for the castle, and then a range of greens for the vegetation and blues for the water. I cut a light grey frame using the largest die from the Spellbinders Radiant rectangles set. I didn´t want to put a sentiment on this image, but I may add one at the last moment, or else print it on the insert instead.

As I used a lot of snippets for the mats in these cards, I will link them up in Pixie´s Snippets Playground.

As my first two and last cards all fit their colour challenge, I am also entering this at The Male Room, where all entries have to be for men or boys.